A Matter of Confidence: The Inside Story of the Political Battle for BC

By Rob Shaw and Richard Zussman

Shortlisted, 2019 BC and Yukon Book Prizes Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction

A breathtaking behind-the-scenes look at the dramatic rise and fall of Christy Clark’s BC Liberals, the return to power of the NDP, and what it means for British Columbia’s volatile political climate going forward.

British Columbia’s political arena has always been the site of dramatic rises and falls, infighting, scandal, and come-from-behind victories. However, no one was prepared for the historic events of spring 2017, when the Liberal government of Christy Clark, one of the most polarizing premiers in recent history, was toppled.

A Matter of Confidence gives readers an insider’s look at the overconfidence that fuelled the rise and fall of Clark’s premiership and the historic non-confidence vote that defeated her government and ended her political career. Beginning with this pivotal moment, the book goes back and chronicles the downfall of Clark’s predecessor, Gordon Campbell, which led to her unlikely victory in 2013, and traces the events leading up to her defeat at the hands of her NDP and Green opponents. Told by reporters Richard Zussman and Rob Shaw, who covered every moment of the election cycle, and illustrated by candid and extensive interviews with political insiders from both sides of the aisle—including Christy Clark and John Horgan—this book is a must read for anyone who cares about BC politics and the future of the province.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: Mar 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781772032550

Rob Shaw

Rob Shaw has covered the BC legislature since 2009, first as the legislative reporter for the Victoria Times Colonist and currently as the legislative columnist for the Vancouver Sun. His stories have appeared in local and national newspapers through the Postmedia News chain.

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PROLOGUE

A DAY FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS

The walls of British Columbia’s legislature were shaking as the government fell.

The cheers reverberated down the hallway, rattling the stained glass windows inside the historic capital building, as members of the New Democratic Party and the Green Party and supporters in the public gallery burst into a raucous ovation. Together the NDP-Green MLAs had just done the unthinkable—they’d outvoted their political enemies, the BC Liberal Party, and brought the provincial government down on a matter of confidence.

British Columbia has a long history of political intrigue, colourfully wacky characters, and fascinating political events. But June 29, 2017, would rank among its most memorable moments. It was the day sixteen years of Liberal rule crumbled, ending a political dynasty that had started with Gordon Campbell and faltered under Christy Clark. It was the day the province’s lieutenant-governor, normally a ceremonial figurehead, exercised rare control of events and rejected the advice of a sitting premier. It was the day an opposition party that had failed to win the last election nonetheless found a way to seize control of power without returning voters to the polls—a sequence of events that hadn’t occurred in the province since 1883.

The public gallery of the legislative chamber was filled beyond capacity that day. The House floor was crowded with MLAs and the former politicians and dignitaries seated in chairs along the marble walls. As the Green and NDP MLAs soaked in the cheers, the Liberals filed out after the vote. The last to leave was Premier Christy Clark.

Two dozen journalists were packed into the hallway outside the chamber, waiting for the fallen premier to arrive. She stepped out of the legislative chamber, wearing a dark blue suit, her head held high despite the crushing loss. Reporters started shouting questions, but Clark began to walk. It was a walk she’d done hundreds of times before. This time was different. Her forty-two Liberal MLAs and their staff had packed the building’s Memorial Rotunda, creating a gauntlet of cheering, clapping, shouting friendly faces to send off their defeated leader.

With tears in her eyes, Clark smiled, waved, and shook hands with the well-wishers as she walked the route to her office for the last time. It lasted only ninety seconds. BC’s major TV news networks, which had carried the confidence vote live, also broadcast the premier’s walk to her west annex office through a second-floor breezeway.

As the doors closed behind Clark, the province held its breath.

There was only one hope left for Clark and her Liberals. She’d have to persuade Lieutenant-Governor Judith Guichon to call a new election, and then take her chances again with voters. The same voters who, just seven weeks earlier, had punished her party severely in Metro Vancouver. With anything less than a new election, NDP leader John Horgan would become premier.

After Clark gathered her thoughts inside her office, she was ready to leave. A Vancouver news helicopter buzzed overhead, tracking Clark and her police escort as she was driven to the Government House mansion. It was only a fifteen-minute journey, but it was as breathlessly covered as if it were a high-speed chase.

As that drama played out, John Horgan, the leader of the NDP, paced his legislature office with his favourite lacrosse stick, tossing a squishy stress ball against the walls and catching it, nervously killing time. There was nothing left for him to do other than wait and hope the lieutenant-governor would call and invite him to take Clark’s place.

Horgan, though, had a strong feeling that this day was his. He’d received a tip-off that morning from Government House. And he could feel in his bones that victory was within his grasp.

Years of planning and politicking would come down to the next three hours. In the time it takes for a Vancouver Canucks hockey game, the landscape of BC politics would be dramatically altered.

At Government House, Clark made the most important pitch of her political life to Guichon. Inside the lieutenant-governor’s private drawing room, Clark spent part of forty-five minutes trying to convince Guichon that calling on Horgan to become premier would be a mistake and would lead to an unstable, unworkable, undemocratic parliament. But she knew almost immediately that her message wasn’t getting through. So the end of the meeting was spent drinking wine, two women tied together for nearly five years saying goodbye. The premier would emerge without her trademark smile, utterly deflated.

She collapsed into a chair in one of the building’s drawing rooms after the meeting, as her staff gathered around her.

I don’t think she’s going to do it, said Clark. I think she’d made up her mind before I got there. And I think she’s going to call on John Horgan.

The iPhone belonging to Horgan’s chief of staff, Bob Dewar, started to buzz. On the other end was the lieutenant-governor’s private secretary, who said, This is your million dollar call. And with that, Horgan was out the door, on what felt like the longest drive of his life—to Government House.

The NDP leader had never really wanted to be leader. It was a job thrust on him in a moment of crisis for the party. At first he’d struggled to fit the role. But in the election, he’d risen to the challenge and excelled. After years of self-doubt, he finally seemed like a premier-in-waiting.

NDP leader John Horgan was all smiles when he left his office at the BC legislature on June 29, 2017, just moments after a call from the lieutenant-governor’s office requesting that he meet with her. Accompanying him was press secretary Sheena McConnell and her husband and NDP staffer, Liam Iliffe. MARIE DELLA MATTIA

As he walked into Government House and was seated in Guichon’s study, Horgan knew, and the province knew, everything was about to change.

June 29, 2017, was a matter of confidence.

The over-confidence of former premier Gordon Campbell, whose harmonized sales tax gave Christy Clark the opening to become premier. The brashness that marked Clark’s time in office, until a non-confidence motion threatened to end her political career. And the questionable self-confidence of John Horgan, the man who had struggled to ready himself for the top job.

It was a day for the history books.

This is the inside story.

CHAPTER 1

THE TAX MAN

It took only forty-eight hours for Gordon Campbell to go from career highlight to career lowlight. Just two days between BC’s thirty-fourth premier standing on a stage at his May 2009 re-election night victory rally, waving at adoring crowds, and his sitting slumped in a chair inside his office, screaming at a bureaucrat who’d delivered him the worst possible news.

Campbell, it turned out, had serious money problems. He’d spent much of his 2009 election campaign promising voters that, despite a worldwide economic collapse, his BC Liberals were prudent, disciplined managers of the economy. They, and only they, and certainly not the NDP, could deliver to taxpayers a budget that had a small, barely noticeable deficit during a time of global turmoil.

The deficit will be $495 million maximum, the confident BC Liberal leader had declared on April 23, 2009, mid-campaign. To make matters worse, he’d doubled down on the line the day after winning the election.

Now, just two days after becoming the first premier in twenty-six years to win a third term and strengthening his majority hold on government, a bespectacled civil servant was standing in one of the premier’s waterfront Vancouver offices, telling him that he was wrong. And not only was Campbell wrong, but this bureaucrat—the deputy minister of finance, no less—was informing him that he was at least $1.5 billion in the red, with virtually no hope of ever hitting the maximum deficit target he’d pinned his credibility on during the campaign. The global recession had pushed BC’s economy, like many others, into a tailspin. Revenues were billions of dollars off course. And they weren’t coming back anytime soon.

Campbell got mad. Very mad.

I’ve just been out and won an election based on $495 (million), he yelled. What the hell are we going to do?

On the receiving end of Campbell’s fury were deputy finance minister Graham Whitmarsh and Finance Minister Colin Hansen. After the premier vented, the meeting broke up. Whitmarsh went into a separate room, inside the premier’s suite of offices at Canada Place in downtown Vancouver.

There was a flurry of activity among senior Campbell staffers at that point, and it was made clear to Whitmarsh he would have to resign. The figures weren’t what the bureaucracy had promised when the budget was tabled in February, and Whitmarsh would need to take responsibility.

No way, said Whitmarsh. Everyone had known all along that $495 million was an aspirational goal, he said. A slim chance. The best, slimmest hope possible. In no way a sure thing. And he’d kept Campbell’s deputy minister in the loop on the numbers, he added.

It wasn’t his fault, Whitmarsh said, that the campaigning politicians hadn’t listened to the warnings of the non-partisan folks inside the finance ministry.

The situation quickly became a standoff.

Everyone went back in to see the mercurial premier.

Okay, said the boss, who had calmed down slightly. Give me some options.

From these tumultuous beginnings was born BC’s harmonized sales tax. Within seventeen months, Campbell’s career would be in ruins and the stage set for the rise of Christy Clark.

THE HST. JUST those three letters are enough to provoke a kind of post-traumatic stress among Liberal politicians and cabinet ministers who served in government at the time and who lived to see the fallout of one the most hated, bungled tax measures in provincial history.

In order to understand exactly how BC got here, you have to first go back to the boss. Gordon Muir Campbell. He was always the smartest person in the room. Or, at least, he thought he was. And he was probably right.

Perhaps it was his voracious reading; he was known to devour books on all manner of subjects at a quick pace, leading to swift policy changes inside his government when an idea caught his fancy. At his cottage on the Sunshine Coast, Campbell’s garage was filled with thousands of books, most of which were overflowing with sticky notes and sections highlighted by a premier who didn’t just read the text but devoured ideas and repurposed them into actual policy.

Or maybe it was his workaholic tendencies. He was often in his office until very late at night, digesting the briefing books of government ministries. He knew the ministry files better than most ministers. And he had little patience for those who wouldn’t keep up.

Or perhaps it was Campbell’s pedigree as a former developer-turned-mayor of Vancouver (he was mayor from 1986 to 1993). Or it could have been because, deep down, he preferred policy to people. Ideas to interaction.

Whatever the reason, Campbell did not lack confidence in his own abilities. He’d even survived a public relations scandal that erupted in 2003 after he was arrested for drunk driving in Hawaii.

As premier, Campbell had achieved considerable success. He’d spearheaded the New Relationship with First Nations communities, recognizing their right to consultation and accommodation on land title and rights years before other provinces. In 2007, he pivoted the government to tackle the issue of climate change, committing the province to a host of new environmentally friendly projects and a promise of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by one-third by 2020. BC wouldn’t achieve that goal, but Campbell’s early focus on climate action would make the province an international leader on the file. Earlier in his premiership he’d cut personal income taxes by 25 per cent, the biggest reduction in BC history. And he was part of an ambitious plan to host the Olympics, which paid off in 2003 when Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Coming out of the 2009 election, Campbell was the undisputed boss of BC politics. With a small circle of powerful loyalists, and a larger circle of people who feared him, he was unchallenged in his dominance of both the Liberal party and the provincial government. His party had grown its majority by three seats, trouncing the New Democrats yet again, for the third straight time.

But more than that, he’d been proven right on one of the most significant tax shifts in BC’s history, the carbon tax. The contentious levy—which most people saw simply as a surcharge on their gas at the pump—had been a Campbell creation and a dominant issue in the twenty-eight-day campaign. BC was so far ahead of the rest of the country on the carbon tax that it would be eight years before Ottawa mandated similar carbon pricing schemes for the rest of the provinces. The carbon tax had also badly divided BC’s New Democrats, who had run an axe that tax campaign that had blown up in their faces and led prominent environmentalists to abandon ship and support the Liberals.

Voters had ultimately agreed with Campbell. The carbon tax wasn’t a needless penalty on drivers; it was an affordable, necessary, and cuttingedge way to protect the environment. And so the policy-wonk premier, who believed he understood tax policy better than almost anyone else, allowed himself to drift into the HST.

The BC government can be a large, unwieldy, slow-moving bureaucratic behemoth. It can take months, if not years, to get a simple permit to start a small project. But when an angry premier shouts urgent orders to fix a political crisis, the civil service moves remarkably fast.

Go out and find out how we’re going to meet the budget target of $495 million, Campbell later recalled himself saying to the bureaucrats.

Fixing this was an important point for the veteran politician. The idea of campaigning on one budget figure, only to unveil worse numbers after winning the election, was unbearable to him. He’d dined out on just that scenario as Opposition leader when in 1996 the NDP government became embroiled in its infamous fudge-it budget scandal, promising a balanced budget during the 1996 election and delivering a massive deficit afterward. Campbell and his Liberals feasted on the scandal for years, never hesitating to remind voters that the NDP were incompetent economic managers. The NDP was the most incompetent, incorrigible and corrupt government in BC history, he’d later say.

Campbell balked at the idea of finding himself in his own fudge-it budget scandal and having similar unflattering monikers etched on his political legacy.

Though by that point it was already too late.

THE 2009 FINANCIAL mess started on January 24, in Courtenay, on central Vancouver Island. Local Liberal MLA and cabinet minister Stan Hagen had passed away suddenly. Family, friends, and Liberal colleagues were in town to attend his memorial service. That evening, after the service was done, Campbell and his chief of staff, Martyn Brown, along with Hansen, Whitmarsh, and outgoing deputy finance minister Chris Trumpy met in a conference room at the nearby Westerly Hotel.

Campbell wanted to table a balanced budget in February, one he could take into the election campaign with confidence to show his party’s strong control of the economy. But the worldwide economic situation made that impossible. After a lot of back and forth, the room settled on the parameters of a deficit, somewhere below $500 million, which was, at the time, the most optimistically credible figure that the financial officials were comfortable with given the financial uncertainty. Even then, it was built on the assumption that the provincial economy would stabilize. It didn’t.

The budget includes a temporary deficit, Hansen said in his budget speech to the legislature on February 17, 2009. Weighed against the risks to our economy, our communities and our future—it is, quite simply, the right thing to do.

When the election campaign began, the finance officials, minister, and premier broke off day-to-day talks, as is customary during a campaign. But the economic numbers continued to worsen. Hitting the deficit target was looking extremely unlikely without massive cuts to services. When Campbell told the media that the $495 million deficit was the maximum, it made the civil servants inside finance even more uneasy.

Whitmarsh had a close relationship with Campbell, having been recruited into government from the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine program as an advisor on carbon trading in the premier’s new climate action office. But as he reflected on the premier’s public promises, Whitmarsh was so nervous that, while on a bike ride along Victoria’s picturesque Dallas Road waterfront, in the middle of the election, he pulled over and called Hansen, his minister, on his cell phone.

I just saw the premier talking and I have to tell you I’m uncomfortable, he told Hansen. When we set that number we knew it was the most optimistic view, and it’s just not going to be anywhere close to that. The deficit was now tracking at several billion dollars, and it would take a Herculean effort to tame it.

Hansen does not remember this call. He does remember speaking to Whitmarsh a couple of times, and hearing that there’d be erosion in revenue of a couple of hundred million dollars—a seemingly manageable figure within a $40 billion budget. Regardless, there things stood until just after the election, when Campbell blew his stack on his officials.

The day after Campbell’s eruption at Whitmarsh and Hansen, the government’s head of tax policy contacted his federal counterpart to ask how much transition funding the province could get to sign on to the HST. The answer was $1.6 billion. The federal cash could have been the salvation Campbell was looking for. Enough, at least on paper, to make the pesky little issue of a stubbornly underestimated deficit election promise disappear quietly.

Whitmarsh and Hansen later returned to Campbell’s office, where they’d compiled a written list of fifteen things the government could do to cut enough expenses that the $495 million deficit would be achievable. The list included steep cuts to programs and services. It also included the HST, which looked like the most palatable of the options, by far. Campbell was intrigued.

BC was told by Ottawa it would have to act quickly if it wanted to join; Ontario was already in the process of moving to the HST, and Ottawa had the capacity to accommodate BC only if it joined Ontario’s process immediately. Otherwise, BC could be waiting for years.

Hansen never questioned that pressure, though in retrospect he regrets not appealing directly to federal finance minister Jim Flaherty for more leniency in the timeline.

BC’s plan to use HST cash from Ottawa to salvage its budget might have worked, too, but by early July revenues had slumped further. Personal and corporate income tax revenues were billions off course. Not even the HST could save them. Hansen started laying the groundwork for the rough landing of the new tax anyway.

In early July, the HST was up for debate at a cabinet meeting. It appeared to be the only option available to backstop the slumping treasury. Like they had many times before, the assembled Liberal MLAs put their faith in Campbell to get them out of the sticky situation.

Campbell, too, had come around to liking the merits of the HST. Yes, it was forced on him in a scramble to salvage a financial disaster. But the policy wonk in him appreciated the elegance of consolidating two taxes into one and eliminating an inefficient provincial sales tax that was long-hated by the business community. So by the time he had to sell it to his colleagues and the public, Campbell was convinced the HST was the right public policy. At one meeting around this time, he was telling senior staff about the decision to proceed with the HST when someone raised the obvious other question: Was it the right move politically?

That’s your fucking job, retorted the premier. Figure that part out.

Those who worked for Campbell guessed the HST could be the end of their boss’s career. And they thought the premier might have known that too.

On July 23, Campbell and Hansen jointly announced that BC had agreed to sign on to the harmonized sales tax. BC would introduce an HST of 12 per cent, replacing the 7 per cent PST and 5 per cent GST, starting in July 2010. Campbell called it the single most important thing he could do to help BC’s economy—ten weeks after an election campaign in which he’d never even mentioned it.

They didn’t know it at the time, but both men had just ended their political careers.

It would take another four years before another Liberal finance minister, Mike de Jong, would admit the government had got it big-time wrong with its 2009 financial figures. But Campbell would be damned if he would admit it at the time.

VOTER OUTRAGE OVER the HST grew quickly. It was built partly on the idea that the Liberals had betrayed the electorate by reneging on a campaign promise not to pursue an HST. But in reality, the HST was never an issue in the 2009 election, and the Liberals had said virtually nothing about the tax. The party’s sole commitment had been a response to a restaurant industry survey in late April during the campaign: The BC Liberals have no plans to formally engage the federal government in discussions about potential harmonization.

Most anger came from the idea that the tax was going to download costs from businesses onto consumers, jacking up the price on some ordinary household items while offering nebulous savings and vague efficiencies to the overall economy. In short, the Liberal-friendly business community would get a break, and everyone else would pay more.

This was the general thrust of the anti-HST campaign that would begin to take form in the months after BC’s HST decision was announced. And it didn’t help that the tax launched without any validators in the business community, which was pretty much the only sector of the province that actually appreciated the change. Anti-HST advocates would comb through the potential tax code, pointing out a variety of items where the PST had not applied, meaning that item would go from being taxed at a rate of 5 per cent (GST only) to 12 per cent under the HST.

The government countered with a grab bag of high-level economic benefits, such as insisting that the HST would save businesses $1.9 billion on sales tax inputs and that—perhaps hopefully—those savings might be passed on to the consumer.

There is probably no one inside or outside the Liberal party who would argue that government did a good job of selling the public on the benefits of an HST. Only ten minutes after the initial press conference, finance officials found themselves deluged by media requests for specific information. How would the HST affect an average BC family? What would it mean for ordinary items, like diapers? What would it mean for complicated transactions, like homes that were partially built?

The finance ministry did not have the answers. There was no money earmarked to hire a dedicated specialist group of HST communicators, something Hansen later deeply regretted. Worse still, the situation was so complicated that senior advisors to the premier and minister didn’t really know how the tax worked.

For every tax expert, or business, government produced to argue that the HST would eliminate the complicated built-in costs of PST applied at every level of a manufactured product, the anti-HST forces would produce an actual living person who was about to get hammered with higher costs for school supplies, restaurant meals, cable TV, and first-aid kits. At one point, the government actually spent $780,000 on a pamphlet it planned to mail to every BC household, extolling the virtues of the HST, but then reconsidered and shredded the whole thing.

Smelling blood in the water, opponents of the Liberals began organizing a formal campaign to oppose the tax. To do it, they’d turn to one of the most unique pieces of legislation in the country.

BC’s INITIATIVE PETITION law was the only one of its kind in Canada. In theory, it gave citizens the power to unite en masse and force politicians to consider new laws at the legislature. All you needed was your own draft bill and fifty dollars for the non-refundable application fee. But in reality, it was believed to be almost unworkable. Since the law’s enactment in 1995, six groups had tried to gather enough signatures under the law to actually win a petition. All six had failed, badly. The closest attempt—a 2002 drive for proportional representation—gathered only 44 per cent of the required signatures.

For a petition to pass, it needed 10 per cent of registered voters in each of the province’s then eighty-five electoral districts. That high bar was 299,611 voters. And to make it even more challenging, you had only ninety days to pull it all off. On the remote chance someone was ever successful at a petition drive, the result would be that the winning draft bill would go to a legislature committee. There, MLAs would recommend that either the winning bill be introduced in the House for a vote as soon as possible or the issue be put out to provincial voters via a province-wide initiative vote—basically, a referendum with different rules.

It was an enormous hurdle that appeared, at the time, to be completely unattainable.

Not to Bill Vander Zalm, though. The former Social Credit premier was at his Delta home when he saw the TV news coverage of the HST. He became incensed, recalling that previous governments, including his, had opposed any attempt by Ottawa to try to encroach on BC’s powers of taxation and horn in on the province’s revenues. Within a week, he was in a photo on the cover of The Province newspaper holding a stop sign and offering to head a revolt against the governing Liberals.

Short of a revolt, we certainly need to make a huge protest, the seventy-five-year-old Vander Zalm told the paper, urging upset citizens to contact him through his website (which was filled with advertisements promoting his coincidentally timed, recently self-published autobiography).

The defiant Dutchman had always been one of the most charismatic characters in BC politics, even after his resignation from office in disgrace in 1991, when he was found to be in conflict of interest for mixing the private sale of his Fantasy Gardens amusement park with his public office as premier. He was quick-witted, eminently quotable, and willing to appear anywhere a news outlet wanted him, at any time.

Enough time had passed since his resignation that the murky details of his conduct—at one point he accepted bags of cash as part of the sale while premier—had faded from public memory. Nobody seemed to remember that Vander Zalm was responsible for introducing one of BC’s other hated taxes, the property transfer tax, which has dinged each home sale in the province for thirty years. He’d been trying to rehabilitate his reputation for years. The veteran politician was quick to wrap himself in the cloak of public righteousness, and soon he was lambasting the new tax for driving up the cost of meals, haircuts, funerals, and other items.

The campaign officially kick-started on September 20, 2009, with nineteen anti-HST rallies taking place simultaneously across the province. The HST plunged the Liberals into a full-out political crisis. The public was furious. The government was on its heels. And the Zalm was stirring up all kinds of trouble.

In Dawson Creek, Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom was watching the HST roll-out with dismay. Although he’d emerged from Campbell’s cabinet in solidarity with the tax, he’d heard from residents in his Peace River South riding that they were unimpressed with the idea that the Liberals had said one thing during the election and done the other after winning. Lekstrom had always been outspoken and unafraid to ruffle feathers within his own party. Tall and fit, with a shaved head and trimmed goatee, Lekstrom often wore a skullcap helmet as he drove his ’78 Harley-Davidson motorcycle down to the legislature. His first vote in the House after being elected in 2001 was against his own party for ripping up labour contracts. You can imagine how Campbell frowned upon that gesture. It would be seven years before Lekstrom was invited into his cabinet. As a minister, Lekstrom was known as a straight-shooter, unafraid to speak his mind even if it didn’t match the script his political masters put in front of him.

Lekstrom arrived for a cabinet meeting in Vancouver on June 11, and, before the meeting started, walked into the premier’s office to have a word.

Gord, I can’t govern this way, and I’m making a decision to step back, said Lekstrom. Unless we put the brakes on and engage the public, I’m not carrying forward.

Campbell was surprised. In different circumstances, with a different minister, he might have blown his top. But Lekstrom wasn’t the kind of guy you yelled at, unless you wanted the burly biker to knock you on your ass.

Blair, my preference is you stick with us, Campbell said diplomatically. But he couldn’t offer to halt the tax, because BC needed to move forward with Ontario, he said. Lekstrom respected Campbell and thought he was a good leader. They got along well. So they ended their conversation there.

Lekstrom asked to break the news of his resignation to cabinet, and Campbell agreed. The response from the rest of the beleaguered ministers was cordial but unenthusiastic. They all knew the kind of signal it sent for a popular cabinet minister to quit in protest over a tax everyone else seemed to hate too. Privately, some felt Lekstrom was weak, almost cowardly, for bailing under the same kind of pressure they were all facing.

Ironically, Lekstrom actually believed in the HST as a tax. It had merit as a policy change, he thought, but it had been so badly handled that it was all but dead in the water. Lekstrom would sit as an independent.

One day in mid-2010, Campbell asked Lekstrom’s replacement, new Energy Minister Bill Bennett, to his office in Victoria. Bennett, who was not particularly close to Campbell, gave him some blunt advice in a wide-ranging forty-five-minute chat: the Liberal caucus was not healthy. There were some rotten apples causing problems, and dissent was spreading and getting worse. Negative cliques were forming. Things were headed in a bad direction, and the party was going to lose the next election unless something was done, advised Bennett.

What do you think I should do about it? asked Campbell.

I think you’ve got to resign and take all this stuff with you, said Bennett. I know it’s not fair.

Campbell paused. Well, he said. I’m not doing that.

But Bennett was far from the only person urging Campbell to consider stepping aside. As the once-invulnerable premier stumbled, the knives started to come out.

Campbell had successfully held together the Liberal free-enterprise coalition of centrist liberals and right-wing conservatives since 1994, through a mixture of policy smarts, keen intellect, loyal soldiers, and fear. Fear came in a variety of forms. Not just fear of a loss at the polls or the disintegration of the government. But fear of Campbell himself, and falling on the wrong side of both his brilliance and his temper.

Among the many profiles written of Campbell over the years, perhaps the most insightful is one by Frances Bula in The Vancouver Sun, just months before he actually became premier in 2001. Bula peeled back the layers of Campbell, then Liberal leader, thus:

He was and remains, in many ways, a classic introvert, preferring to work one-on-one or in small groups, relating to ideas, not people. At the same time he likes to be in control down to the last neutron . . .

Added to all that, he was hard on people. He could listen to people’s opinions attentively while he was still mulling his stance on something, but once he had his mind made up, there was no argument. His decisiveness or opinionated pigheadedness—different people characterize it different ways—could be accompanied by abrasiveness. If someone disappointed him in some way, he acted like a jilted lover . . .

The two Gordons appear everywhere. There’s the private Gordon, whose close friendships are marked by long-standing loyalty. The public one, who is ruthlessly expedient at jettisoning the useless or setting aside the no-longer-needed. The public one who appears cool and bland. The private one famous for his screaming sessions with staff or his manic comedy monologues that have people collapsing in hysterical laughter.

As premier, Campbell would govern in largely the same way. It was a style that inspired fierce loyalty in some colleagues, such as ministers Rich Coleman, Shirley Bond, Colin Hansen, and Pat Bell. They saw one side of Campbell, a warm and often funny leader who gave them space to work on their portfolios. When he was upset, to them it was because he was brilliant and frustrated that it took everyone else so long to catch up.

Those who Campbell felt were quick and competent on their files were rewarded. Those he viewed as incompetent or threats to his power were micromanaged out of existence. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep up with his punishing work ethic on their own files he rode mercilessly, sometimes to tears.